James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Mike Hughes is the Head of Business for the Evening Gazette. He will be blogging on all matters of importance to Teesside businesses - and some that are just worth knowing »
Jez Davison, business writer at the Evening Gazette, is a regular blogger on all things business - particularly finance, entrepreneurship and the state of the Teesside economy » 
Karen McLauchlan is the Evening Gazette's deputy business and features editor - with special interest in all things industry, property and arts related » 
Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » I have just come off the phone from a conference call with Northern Rock chief executive Gary Hoffman, and it's fair to say he is in an upbeat mood about the bank's annual results announced this morning.
The bank has comprehensively beaten targets set down by the Government for its performance during 2009 by some ã500m on an underlying basis.
The headline figure of a pre-tax loss of ã257m is also a huge step forward following the ã1.4bn loss made in 2008.
Inevitably much of the commentary on these results will focus on the bonuses paid to staff.
The vast majority of the bank's workers will get payments of around ã3,000 but Mr Hoffman rightly points out that to confuse these with the enormous sums being paid to investment bankers is misleading.
The average member of staff at the Rock earns less than ã25,000. It is surely right that they are rewarded in a relatively modest way for helping the Rock smash its targets in an impressive fashion,
- Post to:
del.icio.us
Digg
Newsvine
Nowpublic
Reddit
« Previous | Home | Next »